Conclusion

spionage is a secretive business. It is rare that the agents en- gaged in it or the agencies they serve speak honestly and openly about what they have done because the incentives to lie, dissemble, and continue to deceive are so strong for all Econcerned. The tendency to romanticize sometimes dangerous but usu- ally tedious activities also has fed an insatiable public appetite for fictional accounts of spying. Such literature, even when skillfully executed, often cannot match the oddities of the real world, where the best-laid plans of intelligence agencies and their operatives collide with the idiosyncrasies, strengths, and weaknesses of the people on whom they must rely to pro- vide information and the equally human strengths and weaknesses of their adversaries and targets. The documents in ’s notebooks open the most complete view we have ever had of how Soviet intelligence functioned, revealing its triumphs, methods, failures, and frustrations as it strove to obtain American secrets during a crucial era of world politics. The most striking point to emerge from this new information is that a remarkable number of Americans assisted Soviet intelligence agencies. The total exceeds five hundred, only a portion of whom have been dis- cussed in the preceding chapters. There was no shortage of people will-

541

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:43:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 542 conclusion ing to provide information or assistance to the KGB. Not all of them were classic spies, smuggling secrets out of their government offices or scien- tific laboratories. Some were talent spotters who suggested friends and colleagues as likely participants, while others facilitated by pro- viding safe houses, serving as couriers, or otherwise aiding and abetting Soviet intelligence operations in the United States. Soviet spies came in all varieties and from almost all corners of the United States. There were men and women, and gentiles, “old stock” Americans who could trace their lineage to signers of the Decla- ration of Independence, and those born abroad. (Only one identifiable black American appears as a Soviet agent, Paul Williams, a minor aviation source. Largely excluded from positions of authority or places where they handled secrets in the 1930s and 1940s, blacks were also too conspicuous when interacting with whites to serve as couriers or agent handlers.) Some spies grew up in poverty; others basked in luxury from their child- hoods. While many agents had grown up on the sometimes rough streets of or Chicago, others were products of rural or small-town America. Some, like Alger Hiss, were graduates of elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges, holding prestigious government jobs where they were entrusted with great responsibilities and pledged to serve the na- tion’s interests but nonetheless cooperated with agents of a foreign power. Others were anonymous people, living quiet lives and struggling with or- dinary problems and burdens. Some had been seduced by a visit to the USSR; others only read about the supposed paradise in the USSR and yearned to recreate it in America. A number had been born in Russia and retained a visceral national loyalty. For some it was poverty that had embittered them about capitalism; others feared the rise of fascism and grasped at the as its most resolute foe. Most were energized by ideological zeal; others, however, had no commitment beyond mone- tary gain. Most had no difficulty working for the American government and pledging loyalty to the American constitution while giving away American secrets to the Soviet Union, believing they were serving a higher cause. A few were tortured by ethical doubts and vacillation, and others feared the consequences of their actions. And risks there were. Documents recorded in Vassiliev’s notebooks contain accounts of the KGB’s frantic efforts to exfiltrate such valued sources as Julius Rosenberg and David Greenglass as the net closed in around them and the genuine shock experienced by KGB officers that the Rosenbergs faced the same fate that many thousands of “enemies of the people” had suffered on the basis of far less and usually imaginary

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:43:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms conclusion 543 evidence in the Soviet Union. (Similarly, since the early 1930s the USSR had been in a permanent state of mobilization against foreign spies, but in their internal communications KGB officers indignantly complained at various times that American “spy mania” was interfering with their man- agement of dozens of, well, spies.) Some agents thrived on the excite- ment, professing few qualms or fears of exposure and insisted on pro- viding stolen material even during periods when the KGB counseled caution. Others had to be constantly reassured or coaxed to continue. And even ideological sources sometimes worried about exposure or put their own career interests ahead of their work as spies. Many sources were identified and questioned by the FBI or con- gressional committees, although relatively few were prosecuted and even fewer convicted and jailed. (The awkwardness and near inability of Amer- ican criminal law to deal effectively with espionage is a separate matter.) The KGB shut down agents and networks when danger threatened, re- ducing the chances that its assets would be caught in the act. Only a few of those confronted confessed ( in Britain and Alfred Slack in the United States), and even fewer testified against others, most no- tably , David Greenglass, and . Some, like Amadeo Sabatini, made partial confessions, and one, Nathan Sussman, success- fully diverted the Justice Department by admitting Communist mem- bership and testifying about the hidden Communist loyalties of others while concealing years of work as a spy. Most accused agents, however, simply lied or took the Fifth Amendment. The single most disastrous event in the history of Soviet intelligence in America was ’s decision to turn herself in to the FBI in 1945 and tell all she knew. An agent handler, not only did she identify scores of Soviet sources inside the U.S. government and KGB officers with whom she had worked, but her information also led the FBI to focus on Soviet espionage precisely at a time when the end of World War II freed up hundreds of its agents who had been working on German and Japanese counterespionage. Her revelations triggered a wholesale with- drawal of experienced KGB officers that left its American stations woe- fully unprepared for the opening years of the ; led to the pub- lic exposure of links between the American Communist Party and Soviet intelligence that destroyed the former’s use as an espionage Fifth Col- umn; and additionally tainted the Communist movement with treason, contributing to its political marginalization. FBI investigations and voluminous congressional testimony sup- ported Bentley’s story. The documents in Vassiliev’s notebooks, as well as

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:43:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 544 conclusion the KGB cables deciphered by the , demonstrate un- equivocally that Bentley told the truth. Yet the consensus of several gen- erations of American historians (backed by many journalists and other opinion leaders) routinely mocked, ridiculed, and dismissed her as a fraud and mountebank. Those she named were often defended and even praised as devoted public servants unfairly smeared because of leftist as- sociations. They were, however, guilty. Bentley’s defection was the worst but not the first disaster the KGB faced in America. After the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1933, it had set up a legal station operating out of the Soviet Consulate in New York, as well as an illegal station staffed with officers living covertly under false identities. After a series of successes and the construction of net- works supplying scientific, diplomatic, and political information, much of what had been built was destroyed, but not by indifferent or inept Amer- ican security agencies or defectors. The KGB decapitated its own orga- nization in the late 1930s in an obsessive and murderous search for nonexistent traitors. Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s devastated its head- quarters, so much so that in late 1939 a Moscow Center memo noted that illegal officers working covertly in the United States were “unknown to anyone in the department” since everyone who had known them was dead or in the Gulag. Scores of professional field officers were recalled from abroad, accused of being “enemies of the people,” and executed, including the chiefs of the American legal and illegal stations. The robust networks created in the 1930s were deactivated and some of the sources lost forever.1 When sanity returned in 1941, the KGB’s American stations were not entirely starting over, but the reconstruction task was considerable. The Nazi attack on the USSR made the need for intelligence acute, but the crippled American stations had few resources. Fortunately for the short- term needs of the KGB, the American Communist Party maintained large networks of secret party members working in government (managed by Jacob Golos, assisted by Elizabeth Bentley) that it called upon to fill in the gaps while it rebuilt its professional intelligence apparatus. Although it recognized the serious operational deficiencies that the amateurish net- works run by the CPUSA posed, its desperate need for information slowed down its ability to professionalize the operation and sowed the seeds of the disaster that began in 1945 with a series of defections, Bentley chief among them, that ultimately destroyed most of its assets and networks. By the late 1940s, the KGB networks in America were shadows of their former selves, with the dwindling number of sources less able to provide the kinds

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:43:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms conclusion 545 of information Moscow was demanding. One of the few bright spots for Soviet intelligence in the postwar era was the combination of good luck and skill that placed one man, William Weisband, in a position to warn Moscow in 1948 that the United States was reading its military cipher sys- tems, and that one success ended in 1950, when the FBI, following up clues going back to 1943, tracked him down. , another valu- able postwar sources, was arrested in 1948. How much damage did these spies do? As evidence of extensive So- viet espionage has mounted in the past decade, some academics and par- tisans, despite knowing nothing of the substance of what information was passed to Moscow, have simply claimed on the basis of no evidence what- soever that it was trivial or did little damage to American security. Like most intelligence agencies, the KGB was sometimes disappointed or unimpressed by the quality of information it received from its sources. Some people to whom it devoted much attention produced little. And a few sources turned out to be charlatans or even double agents. But the KGB stations in the United States also produced an extraordinary amount of vital information. The scientific and technical data they transmitted to Moscow saved the Soviet Union untold amounts of money and resources by transferring American technology, which enabled it to build an atomic bomb and deploy jet planes, radar, sonar, artillery proximity fuses, and many other military advances long before its own industry, strained by rapid growth and immense wartime damage, could have developed and fielded them independently. Sources in the American government some- times provided low-grade intelligence, but they also gave the USSR an unprecedented window on American diplomatic, economic, and political developments and plans. Sources in the world of journalism passed along useful insights into government, the media, and potential recruits. While any intelligence service covets the key document or set of blueprints, it also relies heavily on a stream of less dramatic information that enables it to form a coherent picture of its adversary and provides a check, a sec- ond source, on what has been learned from the open media and conven- tional diplomacy—and the KGB’s hundreds of American sources and agents did their best to provide such insights. The evidence is that Soviet espionage in the United States changed history. The espionage-enabled rapid acquisition of the atomic bomb emboldened Stalin’s policies in the early Cold War and contributed to his decision to authorize North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. Soviet espionage also led to the loss of America’s ability to read Soviet military communications and ensured that the Ko- rean invasion was a surprise for which American forces were unprepared.

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:43:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 546 conclusion

In addition to enriching our understanding of who worked for the KGB and what information they provided, the documents in Vassiliev’s notebooks are a reminder that some KGB sources went on to successful careers, either because they were protected by the American legal system or because they never came under suspicion. Whether it was Bernard Redmont overseeing a distinguished school of journalism; Russell Mc- Nutt building the planned community of Reston, Virginia; David Salmon retiring from the State Department with the government’s thanks; or I. F. Stone lecturing intellectuals about truth-telling, the spies who got away with it lived lives built on lies and deception. The story of KGB espionage in America is not only an account of So- viet infiltration, but also a panorama of individual lives and frustrations, resentments, and dreams that a foreign intelligence agency was able to take advantage of and manipulate. An espionage service is, in part, a so- cial service agency, required to minister to its charges’ emotional, finan- cial, and marital woes. The documents in the notebooks include accounts of agent handlers and KGB officers soothing, counseling, and admonish- ing their recruits, worrying about their physical and mental health, fi- nancing vacations at health spas, advising about career moves and matri- monial worries, and fretting about their poor decisions or silly mistakes. The Silvermaster network was one of the KGB’s most productive sources of diplomatic and military information, and it also was, to the unease of its officers, a cauldron of unhappy, bitter, and frustrated people, con- stantly sniping at each other and led by a ménage à trois. Even less dys- functional groups required constant soothing and ego stroking, whether to reassure Julius Rosenberg that he remained highly valued despite the need to reduce his role after the government dismissed him from his job because of Communist connections or to persuade diplomat Laurence Duggan, naively believing the Moscow Trials claims that leading Soviet figures had been in league with Germany, that his fears that these Soviet traitors might have revealed his treachery were baseless. The notebooks also suggest that the KGB’s success, while owing in part to the skills and perseverance of its professional officers, also was the result of a great deal of luck and freely offered gifts. While it took ad- vantage of many of its opportunities, it was not the super-efficient, smoothly running machine of popular myth. It was very lucky to have a committed CPUSA anxious to help, government leaders who largely re- garded the Soviet intelligence threat with indifference for many years, and a distracted and sometimes clueless FBI as its foe in the 1930s. And even after the FBI learned the skills needed for counterespionage, it was

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:43:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms conclusion 547 not until the mid-1940s that the Bureau turned its full attention to the So- viet intelligence threat. But when it did, several key defections, the Na- tional Security Agency’s decoding of wartime KGB cables, the inherent vulnerability of the party-based networks, and its full-court press against the CPUSA combined to shatter Soviet intelligence in America.2 A substantial portion of the KGB’s success came from the sources and agents handed to it by the CPUSA. The Silvermaster, Perlo, and Rosen- berg rings all came to the Soviets courtesy of leaders of the American Communist Party. Most of its other productive spies were ideological agents whose recruitment was a result of their commitment to commu- nism; indeed several key sources such as and Klaus Fuchs and the engineer spy Julius Rosenberg were not recruited but sought out the KGB and volunteered their services. But the KGB did recruit a number of sources whose chief commitment was money, such as biomedical spy Earl Flosdorf and aviation source Jones York. Some of the sources recruited by the KGB itself turned out to be more trouble than they were worth. Martha Dodd Stern and Victor Hammer, for example, consumed a great deal of time from professional KGB offi- cers but in the end did not deliver very much useful information or, in Hammer’s case, anything at all. One KGB recruit, Boris Morros, repeat- edly filled the heads of KGB officers with intoxicating tales of his high- level social and business contacts. While he did perform some useful ser- vices, in the mid-1940s the FBI turned him into a double agent, and he went on to expose to prosecution members of a Soviet espionage appa- ratus. Perhaps there was something to Iskhak Akhmerov’s observation that having Americans like Silvermaster run the sources made them more productive, that the KGB officers were unable to get the most out of their commitments or accurately assess their motivation. Without the CPUSA, Soviet espionage rings in the United States would have been far, far less effective and widespread. The weakening of Soviet intelligence opera- tions went hand in hand with the weakening of the CPUSA. Ideological spies present a particularly disturbing challenge in a coun- try where citizenship has never been defined by blood and heritage— with the partial exception of blacks and Indians—but by commitment to a set of democratic ideals. Citizens accused of allegiance to a foreign power have engendered outrage, whether it was Aaron Burr, allegedly seeking to dismember the Union, or German-Americans suspected of disloyalty during World War I. But those who have rejected the principles of the Constitution for another vision of government have earned partic- ular wrath. No era of American life saw so many accusations of espionage

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:43:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 548 conclusion and covert activities on behalf of a foreign country as the decade after World War II. The McCarthy era has long since attained iconic status in American history as the symbol of paranoia about “reds hiding under the beds.” Al- though the postwar attack on the CPUSA preceded Senator McCarthy’s rise to prominence, the picture of a relentless governmental persecution of a perhaps annoying but ultimately harmless movement is regularly in- voked as an object lesson in the erosion of civil liberties. Most American Communists were not spies; the KGB did not need or want the CPUSA’s fifty-to-sixty thousand members as agents. But the documents in Vas- siliev’s notebooks make crystal clear that the CPUSA’s leadership in the 1930s and 1940s willingly placed the party’s organizational resources and a significant number of its key cadres at the service of the espionage agen- cies of a foreign power. The CPUSA as an organized entity was an auxil- iary service to Soviet intelligence. Dozens of its members working for the American government or employed in scientific research handed over in- formation, sometimes with the full knowledge that they were serving the Soviet Union, sometimes comforting themselves that they were only in- forming the CPUSA leadership, and occasionally willfully deceiving themselves about the ultimate destination of the material. It was no witch hunt that led American counterintelligence officials to investigate government employees and others with access to sensitive information for Communist ties after they became cognizant of the extent of Soviet espionage and the crucial role played in it by the CPUSA, but a rational response to the extent to which the Communist Party had be- come an appendage of Soviet intelligence. And, as the documents in Vas- siliev’s notebooks make plain, they only knew the half of it.

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:43:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms